Erich Stauffer

Tag: Trends

  • On Facebook Acquisitions, Predicting the Future, and Messaging

    In the book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, I learned that people aren’t very good at predicting the future, but they are okay at predicting the next thing. Our brains just aren’t wired to take 2 steps at once, but we can make 1 step + 1 more step fairly easily. Because this explanation sounds dumb, you know that it’s true. Let me give you an example from the book:

    Hand a person a box of tacks, a book of matches, and a candle. Ask them to mount the candle on the wall.

    Most people first start by making a shelf of tacks on the wall and then attempting to mount the candle on the shelf. Once they realize the box is empty and they see the shelf they think: I can use the box as a shelf and they correctly mount the box to the shelf with the tacks and put the candle in the box.

    Facebook bought Oculus Rift. Facebook bought Whatsapp.

    Months later we are just now seeing how those first steps are leading to the next steps. Oculus Rift lets people experience virtual worlds with other, real people in real-time. Whatsapp is a messenger platform. Facebook is a social media platform, which also features a heavy game element and already had Messenger. Messaging is already a bigger platform worldwide than social media and is set to grow. Gaming platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, and Battle.net are likely where Facebook is headed with their VR set, but I’m guessing they will have a live-meeting aspect as well.

    I’m rambling now. I don’t know anything. Here’s what I know:

    When I was young I used to have a third place to call my own. It was called “The Blue Lounge“. When that was threatened, I built an outdoor Blue Lounge. When that was taken away, I kept looking. I kept looking for a place that I could meet my friends and have a conversation. I dreamed of a day where I could virtually sit in a room with people just like I could back in the Blue Lounge. Now that day may be approaching.

    But what about coffee?

    I hear you. Get coffee together when you can. We’re not animals. Get out of your storage shed, onto your motorbike, and get down to The Raft to be with other people now and again. It’s good for you – and you just might save the world.

  • 2014 Trends in Technology

    We’re just about 50% through the year and a few people have been releasing new reports on trends so I thought I’d highlight some things here:

    • Mobile – while the ability to make money from apps may be harder now, the use of mobile devices is only going up (1,2). The future of mobile is a more integrated society with more access to information formatted in new, useful ways.
    • Biofeedback/Quantified Self – from Fitbit to the new iPhone, sensors are becoming smaller and more ubiquitous. Accelerometers are now embedded in the processors themselves and the new iWatch may include advanced biosensor features.
    • Open Data – data.gov is the biggest example, but there are other examples, which you can find at http://www.opendatanow.com/. New businesses are being formed around analyzing and using this newly accessible data.
    • API Access – not only do sites like data.gov have open data, but now sites like http://open.fda.gov/ have API access to that data; and sites like IFTTT and Zapier make it easy for non-programmers to move data around in complex ways.
    • 3D Printing – CDW and Staples now sell 3D printers. Kids are designing and printing their own objects. If you want to ride the next PC-like wave, this is it. It’s hard to see now because it’s so new, but this is a new industry.

    If this interests you, compare it to the trends I speculated about the 13 trends changing the world in 2013 to see how many of them stayed true:

    1. Crowdfunding – Kickstarter just raised funding for Reading Rainbow.
    2. Crowdsourcing – The Reddit hive mind is the best detective on the planet.
    3. Open Source – Firefox just took their codebase closed-source.
    4. Insourcing – Robotics is allowing manufacturing to be cheaper in America.
    5. Infilling – Inner cities are encouraging growth to raise tax income locally.
    6. Cloud Apps – Chromebooks have risen in popularity and use.
    7. Long Tail – HBO shows now available on Amazon Instant Video.
    8. 3D Printing – SEE above.
    9. Augmented Reality – Facebook just bought Oculus Rift.
    10. Electric Cars – California’s biggest car manufacturer is now Tesla*.
    11. Private Space Exploration – Virgin Galactic not yet having regular flights, but SpaceX* is.
    12. Mobile Computing – SEE above.
    13. Mobile Payment Processing – Square and Starbucks continue to innovate.

    Out of the 13 trends, I’d say at least 10 are still going strong, but at least one has stagnated, replaced by Open Data and API Integrations.

    *Both Elon Musk companies.

  • 13 Trends That Are Changing the World

    Things change and will continue to change, that much we know. But sometimes the change is so incremental that it’s hard to notice. This post aims to take a step back and review where we are now and where we might be going.

    1. Crowdfunding – funding a project large or small used to be limited to knowing the right people, lucky breaks, or having a proven business model, but now a new method for funding a project has emerged. Crowdfunding allows many people to give small amounts, which in aggregate help fund a larger goal. It can be used to fund an art project, a new product, or even a political campaign. One of the most popular crowdfunding sites is Kickstarter, but AngelList has a list of crowdfunding sites here. Here is a list of crowdfunding for scientific research. We will continue to see more of these types of sites set up to serve more unique, niche areas of the economy.
    2. Crowdsourcing – breaking big jobs into little jobs that anyone can do or opening up a contest for a complex problem that anyone can enter are two forms of crowdsourcing. Sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk is an example of the former, creating small, repeatable tasks for people to perform while the X Prize Foundation is a good example of the latter where prize money is given to those who can show they can overcome big problems. Crowdsourcing has proven to be fuel for innovation when traditional methods just aren’t working. This will continue be a method used by organizations in the future.
    3. Open Source – building hardware or software while making the information, code, and plans public information has proven to be a viable way to build new companies, highlight worker skills, and help the world. Old theories about how people won’t work for free or that organizations won’t do anything that doesn’t directly make them money have been turned on their head by open source projects like Wikipedia and Mozilla. Android, the most widely used mobile operating system, is also open sourced, along with the backbone of the Internet, Linux and Apache. The future will continue to use open source initiatives.
    4. Insourcing – the opposite trend of outsourcing, this is where organizations begin pulling their talent, manufacturing, and logistics back inside their company, not as a vertical move, but one that makes sense for communication, intellectual capital protection, and patent creation. Some of this may run counter to the open source movement, but it nevertheless is still happening. Companies who used to outsource their call centers or programming to India are now bringing the operations back to the United States. Even Apple is now bringing the manufacture of some of its products back to the United States.
    5. Infilling – instead of building out and creating more sprawl, communities are choosing to build in and between existing buildings in order to create more dense, walkable neighborhoods. Instead of creating new housing editions, new home construction is occuring in exsiting neighborhoods between existing homes. According to the EPA, “Nearly three out of four large metropolitan regions saw an increased share of infill housing development during 2005-2009 compared to 2000-2004.” This trend then allows more benefit from public transportation, bike and walking paths, which are growing in popularity.
    6. Cloud Apps – storing data and running programs from shared servers instead of each organization running local programs on local servers is more efficient and allows for easier access to the data from a variety of devices and platforms (as long as they are on the Internet). The high-availability of the Internet coupled with low server costs and the near ubiquitousness of smartphones makes for a perfect storm for cloud apps to replace local workstation and server apps like Microsoft Office. In some ways, the operating system itself has become less relevant as it is increasingly used only as a gateway to Internet-based cloud apps.
    7. Long Tail – this is the idea that there is just as much value in a wide variety of small niches as there is in the biggest blockbuster hits of any industry. If you’ve ever heard the term, the riches are in the niches, it’s true just as much as the riches are in the blockbusters. Back when books required cutting down a tree to print and movies were only distributed on VHS and DVD, the cost of printing anything other than the most popular items was prohibitive, but with ebooks and streaming video, the cost of distribution is way less, leading to more choice and a longer tail of products. The same is happening with 3D printing technology.
    8. 3D Printing – while reductive 3D printing technology has been around for a while, it’s the additive type that is getting the most attention nowadays because instead of using milling drilling technology to reduce a block of material down, additive printing builds an object up, which uses less material. When coupled with open source 3D printing hardware and cheap 3D scanning technology like the Microsoft Kinect, a new hacker-like “maker culture” is emerging that is set to create a whole new industry. There is a new industrial revolution and it’s happening in garages all over the country, which will create untold new businesses.
    9. Augmented Reality – while hinting at it for over a year, Google has officially released Google Glass to a limited public. The glasses layover meta information about your environment that only you can see and interactive with via voice. This is only one type of augmented reality, but it’s one I’ve predicted to eventually take the place of mobile phones and why I think Warby Parker will be the next Apple. Why would people take the time to look at their mobile phone when they can have the same relationship always in view? This technology is bound to be disruptive to privacy and relationships, but only time will tell.
    10. Electric Cars – while natural gas, electricity, and even coal has been delivered to your home over the last century, we’ve always had to drive to the gas station to fill up our cars. Now, instead of laying new gasoline pipelines to our homes, we can use the electric lines to charge our cars overnight. It’s perfect for short commutes and teenagers you don’t want driving very far, but that will change. Battery technology and power infrastructure will continue to improve along with society’s point of view of how a car should be driven and when. Electric cars will only continue to grow in popularity thanks mostly to Tesla Motors.
    11. Private Space Exploration – it’s hard to talk about private space exploration and electric cars without bringing up Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. If it weren’t for the development and sale of payment processor, PayPal, there might not be a space vehicle capable of servicing the International Space Station right now, which is what SpaceX is doing. But the bigger story is the men who are going to Mars (1,2) and the organizations planning on mining asteroids for profit. The future outlined in Aliens is finally coming to fruition, just in time for the new Star Wars to come out in a couple of years (with J.J. Abrams!).
    12. Mobile Computing – mobile computing may not seem like that big of a deal now because it’s used so much and so often it’s starting to fade into the background, but that’s precisely why I bring it up. We all have Internet access, calculators, video/still cameras, calendars, social networks, GPS receivers, and highly specialized apps in our pockets. Most of us could do our jobs if not run our companies from our smart phones. While there is some decent processing power, most of it happens on the cloud, which is also where most of our data is stored. It’s the way things work now and will be more so in the future.
    13. Mobile Payment Processing – while this technology seems less revolutionary than space travel or electric cars, the ability for any person to accept any form of payment at any time is now at hand. From mobile to mobile payment apps at your bank to specialized services like Square, the ability to take credit card payments or make a payment using your mobile phone through services like Starbucks’ app make the mobile payment revolution a real one. The era of paper money and checks is slowly dying as the rise of the smartphone and Internet access makes this process much more efficient. Look for these services to grow.

    Of course there are more than these and some of you may argue as to the importance of these or others, but these are the ones I’ve been exposed to. It really boils down to three primary trends:

    • The love children of Smartphones and The Internet – what happens when the adjacent possible of two of the biggest technological contributions ever combine to form our new technological paradigm?
    • The love of Efficiency – electric cars and 3D printing are all about being more effecient and better stewards of our stuff – you shouldn’t have to move so much stuff around to move so much stuff around.
    • The love of Control – people want access to the stuff they want, whether it’s a new product, an old movie, their money, or their data – give it to them or they will find someone to give it to them for them.

    Thoughts?

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  • Trends

    We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

    1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
    2. Commitment – “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
    3. High Value Content – This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
    4. Humanization – This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
    5. Case Studies – Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
    6. Stories – Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
    7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

    Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

    Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

    High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

    Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

    Case Studies – Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

    Stories – If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

    Do Something Great – It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

    In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

    “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
    – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

  • The eReader Revolution

    How eReaders (also written e-Readers), which are digital readers for eBooks (also written e-Books) have taken over the tech news and gadget landscape? From Amazon’s Kindle™ which was first released on November 19, 2007 to Barnes and Noble’s nook™ which was first released November 30, 2009 to Apple’s iPad which was released April 3, 2010, there clearly is a revolution going on in how books are read, purchased, stored, and shared.

    The first chart shows the dramatic rise in news articles related to ereaders starting in 2009. This chart also highlights the differences in spelling of the different terms for ebook readers. While there is no official way of spelling it (both ereader and e-reader are acceptable), Google Trends clearly shows that “ereader” is used more often or is more popular. In general I think that if hyphens can be avoided, they will be, just as in “e-mail” is more often written as “email.”

    The second chart shows the steady rise of Amazon’s Kindle, followed by the nearly identical rise of Barnes and Noble’s Nook an Sony’s Reader. Other ebook readers like the Que and Alex don’t yet register in comparison to the traffic of these other major players, but if you compare Apple’s iPad against this chart, it makes the Kindle look pathetic in comparison.

    Now these are mostly news trends and not necessarily a reflection of popularity or quality, but it does highlight a tipping point in the use of ebook readers that happened at the end of 2009, about a year after the market crash in 2008. Despite a recession and a bad world-wide economic situation, consumers have still went out and purchased not just ebooks and ereaders, but e-reader accessories, which can sometimes equal or cost more than the ereader itself. Nook covers, for example, average around $25 each.

    How about you? Do you own an ereader or plan on purchasing one in 2010? Answer in the comments below.

  • Television Re-Defined

    Snuffaluffagus ProofThe lines between television and the Internet have been blurring so long I hereby no longer define television as a device which sits in your living room, but as a medium that can be played anywhere. I can play television on any device I choose. I have come not to be thankful that the shows I see on traditional television networks are available online, but to expect it – and when they are not, I am shocked, then angry.

    I can view television on my LG cellphone, my Apple iPhone, my HP netbook, my Dell Desktop. I can play TV on the Internet through a network’s website such as ABC.com, NBC.com, or CBS.com, or through aggregate networks like Hulu.com. My favorite, by far though is on Netflix using their instant viewing feature. My wife now watches more shows on Netflix than on our XP Media Center PC, which saves shows from cable television.

    Wired Magazine ran an article April 2007 entitled, “The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV”. The gist is that, “TV is evolving into something new and hardly recognizable to generations raised on its earlier incarnations.” This evolution is more of a time-and-space separation. Where and what we watch is no longer coupled with a specific device, location, or time of day. But what does this do to the previous culture we had whereby office cooler or dinner table talk revolved around the happenings of a popular show? The term “popular” is now somewhat irrelevant. You might even go as far to say that going forward, markets won’t exist, only niches and micro-niches.

    In the photo you can see me pointing out “proof” that Snuffaluffagus exists.  This is a sort of inside-joke between peers of my generation who grew up watching Sesame Street back when Big Bird was the only one who could see “Snuffy.”  This was also back when the Cookie Monster actually was allowed to eat cookies, but both have changed.  Nowadays, are there enough children watching Sesame Street to allow for such inside-jokes? This isn’t a problem, per se, but just a reflection of our times.  You might even say, “The Market is Dead. Long Live the Market.”

  • 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Small Business Forever

    1. Ultra-Local Marketing – direct communication between business owners and their local markets allows for business large and small to add a personal touch and an heir of transparency to give them a human edge in an increasingly no-touch technology world awash with noise.
    2. Networking Old-World Advertising – the still-successful outdoor advertising and television commercials are now being used in conjunction with Twitter to give businesses more ROI and feedback on ad placements and their effectiveness. Even without tie-ins, searches for responses on Twitter can sometimes be just as revealing.
    3. Uprooting Wall Street – think of the “Mad Money Effect” on steroids.  When people start talking about a stock and that it should be bought, it gets bought, and conversely, talk about selling leads to selling.  This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, but nevertheless is an effect of Twitter on business stocks.
    4. Making Blogs Relevant – blogs entered the scene in a huge way a few years back, but have since become mainstream and a bit of a victim of their own success.  Because of the ease of making blogs, their overall saturation is high and readership has suffered.  Enter Twitter: hyper-focused followings with links to blog posts of interests have made blogs more powerful than ever before.  Call it the SEO effect or not – Twitter is shaping how blogs are viewed as a resource around the world.
    5. New Ways to Gather Data – never before has there been a literal tap into the stream of consciousness as there is on Twitter.  A quick search on Twitter’s real-time search engine at http://search.twitter.com reveals whatever anyone was last thinking.  Businesses have an amazingly powerful research tool like never before.
    6. Helps TV, Radio, and Print Interact – when you see CNN co-anchoring Twitter side-by-side with the host of the show, you know Twitter has hit mainstream.  Twitter allows live television shows,  radio stations, and magazines get feedback on what they are doing, know what people think, and how they feel.
    7. Channeling Micropayments – Twitpay and services like it facilitate small loans or payments to companies or between individuals  and will extend the reach of operations like eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal. eBay, Amazon (AMZN) and other e-commerce companies will get a financial benefit from real-time micropayments.
    8. Changing Telecommunications – Telecom companies have chosen to manage user behavior by forcing customers to transfer voice, video and data on platforms that they can track. Twitter will force telecoms into a position similar to the one cable companies find themselves in.
    9. Government Interaction – Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs to distribute emergency notices to citizens quickly like with the Emergency Broadcast System that was used to reach the public over radio and TV starting in 1963.
    10. Enhancing Charity – The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google and Facebook have had in the past decade.